Meditation and Poetics - 93 - Haiku - 6 (More Haiku)

A cricket chirps and is silentthe guttering lamp sinks and flares up againOutside the window, evening rain is heardIt’s the banana plant that starts talking about it.It’s the banana
plant that speaks of it first

[That’s typical of (William Carlos) Williams, that style or that kind of observation. Williams and (Ezra) Pound did begin to derive from haiku (We’ve got to remember that Pound
translated some Chinese and Japanese poetry and did actually try to work on haiku, around the turn of the century.)]

Who is it that grieves?The wind blowing through his beardfor late autumn.

[You might say that’s an Objectivist poem in the sense that it’s
the thought in the mind of the observer, but it’s sort of (an) impersonal
observer looking at his own impersonal self]

Who is it that grieves?The wind blowing through his beardfor late autumn

A flying squirrelis crunching a small birdon the withered moor.

The moon,coming
back with me from the mountainsentered the gate
together with me.

[That’s so sort of subtle. There’s a lot of little things about
distance and dealing with space, distance, actually – dealing with the
sensation of space using moon as coordinate – or scarecrow as coordinate. I
think there’s a haiku.]

Walking through the autumn moorthe scarecrowwalked with me

[That is a common observation (from) walking – a distant object
seems to move – which conjures up the sensation of space, without having to
yatter about space all the time.

Now this is a little Wordworth-ian.I think I had mentioned “green
to the very door”. Have we worked on that?Yes.]

Ivy creepsover the wooden doorunder the evening moon

[Ivy creeps/ over the wooden door/ under the evening moon –
Because, first of all, you’ve got the whole human-garden-house relationship,
where ivy.. or perhaps nobody (is) there in the house – “Ivy creeps/over the
wooden door”. But the ivy under the moon? So there are a couple of space
coordinates. Let’s see, there’s the small ivy, there’s the moon, there’s the
silence. So you get a silence, you get a spaciousness from the moon to the
door.]

Student: Opposites.

AG: Yeah. You get the opposites. You get all the opposites. But
my own insight constantly is that the space is the key. Like in (Paul) Cezanne. It’s the reconstruction
of a little sensation of space, (which, in his canvases, Cezanne pointed out as
pater omnipotens aeterna deus –
eternal father omnipotent – eternal god – but some eternal quality of space
itself, which is silent), which is constantly conjured up in these by using
coordinates within space to present the space, without referring directly to
the space, because, as Francine said,
(there’s) the space itself or there is something that is not nameable. You
could call it space, but by presenting sharply defined objects in relation
within it you do conjure it up. It’s that same space that we practice
appreciation of by meditation – through breath flowing out into space, mixing
mind with breath, mixing mind, mixing breath with space, mixing mind with
space. So that every breath becomes a haiku
– Yes?

Student: Also a sense of time, too.

AG: Yes. Well..Student:
(Like the ivy on that) house...AG: YesStudent: (..seems to be in this poem)AG: Oh, in this, yes.Student:
(Emptiness in time?)AG: Yeah, Well, maybe the time.. the emptiness there of nobody there
anymore, perhaps So, a long time gone since that house was dwelt in.There is space and there is time.